Examines the context for management studies of Gulf schooling, indicates areas of concern, suggests topics for research and discusses field research in Dubai. Most staff are Arabic‐speaking expatriates, and reliable statistical information is not at present available. Education is a free gift to citizens who are not taxed, and is thus unaccountable. A public policy tradition hardly exists. Decision making is in the hands of a heavily bureaucratic local ministry, and tends to lack coherence. There is a pressing need for research in management, particularly in the key area of reducing educational wastage rates. Management of contract expatriate staff, policy at institutional level, staff development, curricular issues and teacher training also merit study.
This paper examines managerial and associated aspects of monitoring pupil progress in United Arab Emirate state schools, based on an empirical study carried out over five years in the Dubai Educational Zone. Such monitoring has been recognised as of importance to school effectiveness and improvement. It is of special concern in the Gulf because of the prevalence of underachievement and drop‐out there. The Ministry requires only raw data of test and examination performance. Gathering this consumes much time and energy but contributes little to student learning. Data concerning “at‐risk” students are not shared. Recommendations are made. Study of this aspect of schooling allows the opportunity to examine other significant managerial aspects of UAE schools.
Since members of the mass professions are employed mainly by large organisations in the public sector, they are increasingly 'managed'. What is happening to their skills, their control over their own work, and their professionalism, are matters of concern as revealed by recent disputes. These are precisely questions at the heart of the labour process debate relaunched by Braverman. The insights generated by this stream of writing, already profitably applied beyond blue collar work to clerical occupations may be extended to embrace elements of the service class. There the notion of indetermination goes beyond the notion of discretion. Changes in public ideology have effects analogous to those arising from technological innovation in manufacturing. Yet professionals, whilst attending to technological aspects of their work, typically ignore the wider social issues. In this respect they are vulnerable to deskilling and erosion of control over their work. processes operate and are managed, matter to a wide range of occupations, even if in not quite so clear cut a way as Braverman makes out in relation to his chosen group. Crompton and Jones (1984) and Lane (1985) have made good use of this body of work by applying it in the context of clerical work, reaching, incidentally, somewhat contrasting conclusions. This encourages the idea that applications in non-industrial contexts are potentially fruitful. So, what about the mass professions? Schoolteaching, in some externals not too unlike clerical work -well stratified, lower middle and aspirant working class in recruitment, with a large female element, organised in many small units and currently in a troubled state -lends itself to such an analysis. Applications could readily be extended to social work; less readily, but possibly, to middle-ranking administrative workers in local authorities and the civil service, and to ancillary professionals in the health service.At first sight it may well seem to be straining labour process notions a good deal to apply them in this way. Deskilling by the introduction of technology is not evident, save perhaps in medical areas; standardisation and cheapening have not occurred in any obvious fashion. Replacing the small units by large ones, in the case of schools, is fiercely resisted. Teaching is an obstinately low technology business, and schools which employ more than SO staff are a small minority. But there are enough parallels with skilled employment to warrant pursuing the discussion. The industrial action (1985), prolonged, solidary, deeply felt, the most serious for over half a century, is not unconnected, I shall suggest, with the labour process issue. Emphasis within the current debate may have to be modified if the insights it has generated are to be applied to mass professional employment; nevertheless teaching, social work, nursing, the caring professions generally, are increasingly 'managed' (Sayer, 1980), and that management made ever more accountable. Hence, no doubt, interest in the post Braverman debate in some unexpe...
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